History is What Hurts: Queer Feelings, Alien Temporalities in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa

Abstract

The Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa believed that indigenous spirituality could be carried in the mixed-race ‘blood’ of the mestiza, and tapped into psychically. This psychic access could then bring up, as if from the depths of time, an authentically indigenous, if alien, soul-sensibility into the mestiza consciousness and thus into the present. Following Suzanne Bost, I think of this process as a way of ‘feeling pre-Columbian’. I argue that Anzaldúa used this feeling to queer the notion of historical change through a long and inaccessible time as, instead, a spatial and therefore crossable distance. In this paper, I trace a genealogy of what might loosely be called ‘New Age’ transnational Latin/o American notions that the indigenous psyche occupied a different (and more spiritual) temporality as groundwork in understanding how Anzaldúa comes to her complex envisioning of a bodily and psychic, queerly indigenous space outside popularly received ideas of historical time and cultural change. This intellectual genealogy illuminates how Anzaldúa comes to this rejection of ‘history’ as such, and to her formulation of an intimately alien, foldable psychic space outside time and historical change.